IRE and Merrill College Data Journalism Training

Dow Jones News Fund @ Merrill College

Sunday, June 1 - Sunday, June 8, 2025

(ver April 7, 2025)



Rob Wells, director
David Herzog, co-director
Karen Denny, co-director  
Bridget Lang, assistant

Itinerary

Pre-Conference

Sunday, June 1, 2025

Monday, June 2, 2025

Tuesday June 3, 2025

Wednesday June 4, 2025

Thursday June 5, 2025

Friday June 6, 2025

Saturday June 7, 2025

Sunday June 8, 2025

Instructors

Kevin Blackistone

Kevin Blackistone is a longtime national sports columnist now at The Washington Post, a panelist on ESPN’s “Around the Horn,” a contributor to National Public Radio and coauthor of “A Gift for Ron,” a memoir by former NFL star Everson Walls published in November 2009 that details his kidney donation to onetime teammate Ron Springs.

Blackistone was a sports columnist for AOL Fanhouse from October 2007 to March 2011 and an award-winning sports columnist for The Dallas Morning News from September 1990 to September 2006.

Blackistone is a recipient of numerous awards, including awards for sports column writing from the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors, for investigative reporting from the Chicago Newspaper Guild and for enterprise reporting from the National Association of Black Journalists.

Karen Denny

Karen Denny is Merrill College’s director of internships and career development. She previously served as the Annapolis bureau director of the Capital News Service, until taking over leadership of the career center at the beginning of 2022. Denny is a former editor with the McClatchy-Tribune (formerly Knight Ridder/Tribune) News Service, where she founded the wire’s Newsfeatures and International sections, and most recently was a features editor.

She previously worked as the Maryland editor for The Washington Times, and at the suburban Journal Newspapers as an editor and local government reporter. She also served as a professor at Sang Ji University in Won Ju, South Korea.

David Herzog

David Herzog is a veteran investigative reporter, data journalist and educator with more than 30 years of experience. He enjoys discovering how journalists can use data analysis tools to uncover the news better. Herzog teaches data journalism to student and professional journalists. He speaks frequently about investigative reporting, data journalism and access to information.

As the academic adviser to the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, he helps guide data services for Investigative Reporters and Editors. IRE is a global organization with more than 5,000 members based at the Journalism School. He helps direct the Dow Jones News Fund’s data journalism residency program for IRE.

He is part of the interdisciplinary team that launched the online M.S. in Data Science and Analytics program at the University of Missouri. He developed and teaches a data journalism class geared toward professionals for the program.

He’s reported for The Providence Journal, The Baltimore Sun, and The Morning Call in Allentown, Pa. He’s won or shared in national, regional and state awards for investigations into political corruption, child lead poisoning and lax workplace safety.

Adam Marton

Adam Marton is an award-winning journalist and graphic designer who joined the Philip Merrill College of Journalism in 2018 after 13 years at The Baltimore Sun.

Marton is focused on quality storytelling across media, using design and technology to tell rich, human stories. He is a visual journalist and designer specializing in the presentation of the news, including data visualization, front-end development and information graphics.

Constance Mitchell Ford

Constance Mitchell Ford, a 1977 University of Maryland graduate, is a financial journalist who spent more than three decades covering economics, banking, investing and real estate.

Most of those years were spent at The Wall Street Journal in New York, most recently as the Global Real Estate and Property Bureau Chief. Under her leadership, reporters in the real estate group won dozens of journalism awards. Ford personally received the Scripps Howard National Journalism Award for business and economics reporting in 2007 for stories about the subprime mortgage crisis.

Sean Mussenden

Sean Mussenden, a former Washington correspondent, is the data editor for the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism. He previously oversaw an experiential, hands-on journalism training program at Merrill College that is integral to the college’s “teaching hospital” model of professional instruction: Capital News Service.

He also teaches traditional courses incorporating data visualization, programming, web development, web design, data analysis, social media and computational journalism. Mussenden was appointed to the rank of principal lecturer in 2023.

Bridget Lang

Bridget Lang is a software developer for the University of Maryland. In 2024, she earned her bachelor’s degree in computer science with an upper-level concentration in journalism. A Baltimore County native, Lang uses her skills in software development, data, and writing to tell stories in the best way possible. She has had articles published in the Baltimore Banner and Capital News Service and is assisting Wells on a research project about an influential conservative journalist.

Christoph Mergerson

Christoph Mergerson, who completed his Ph.D. in Communication, Information and Media at Rutgers University, joined the Philip Merrill College of Journalism in Fall 2021 as a visiting assistant professor. He was appointed to the rank of assistant professor in Fall 2022.

Mergerson’s research and teaching interests include journalism history, weather journalism, race and media, and journalism and democracy. Mergerson arrived at Merrill with ongoing research that examines whether news media in the Southern United States are producing racially inclusive, public-service journalism. He brings award-winning classroom experience from teaching courses at Rutgers, including Communication Law and Global News.

Daniel Trielli

Daniel Trielli joined the Philip Merrill College of Journalism’s faculty in Fall 2023 as assistant professor of media and democracy.

He researches the impact of algorithmic curation on journalism and political information, and studies how Google affects the news and the audiences that use it to search. He is interested in data and computational journalism, media literacy and algorithmic accountability. Trielli came to Merrill College as a master’s student in 2015 after a 10-year career as a journalist in Brazil at the national newspaper, O Estado de S. Paulo, and the regional newspaper, Diário do Grande ABC.

Rob Wells

Rob Wells, a 2016 Ph.D. alum of Merrill College, returned to the university in the Spring 2022 semester after more than five years at the University of Arkansas, where he rose to the rank of associate professor and led Arkansas’ journalism graduate program. Wells has more than two decades of business journalism experience at The Associated Press, Bloomberg News and The Wall Street Journal.

Wells is the author of “The Enforcers: How Little-Known Trade Reporters Exposed the Keating Five and Advanced Business Journalism” (2019) and “The Insider: How the Kiplinger Newsletter Bridged Washington and Wall Street” (2021).

Derek Willis

Derek Willis, one of the nation’s leading data journalists and an experienced educator, joined the Philip Merrill College of Journalism in Fall 2021 as a lecturer in data and computational journalism.

Willis came to Merrill College having spent 25 years winning awards at some of the top news outlets in the country. His latest stop was ProPublica, where he served as a news applications developer since 2015.

He previously held interactive journalism roles with The New York Times and The Washington Post, after working as a database reporter for The Washington Post, The Center for Public Integrity, Congressional Quarterly and The Palm Beach Post.

Guest Speakers

Cheryl Thompson

Cheryl W. Thompson is an investigative correspondent for NPR and senior editor overseeing Member station investigations.

Since becoming the inaugural editor of the stations investigations team in 2021, where she is a player/coach, she has collaborated with Member stations in Texas, California, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, Oregon and Washington, and with Columbia University and several nonprofits, to do award-winning work, including “Hot Days: Heat’s Mounting Death Toll on Workers in the U.S.,” an investigation into how Black and brown workers in the U.S. were dying on the job for lack of water and shade breaks. That series won several awards in 2022, including an IRE and National Headliner. An examination of racial covenants still on the books throughout the U.S. won a National Headliner award and an award from the National Association of Black Journalists. An investigation into deaths at tribal jails won awards from PMJA and the Native American Journalists Association. And an investigation into ballot drop boxes in Georgia after the 2020 presidential election won a 2023 NABJ award.

She also served as the investigative reporting coach on the No Compromise podcast that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting. That same year, NPR honored her with the Public Service Journalism award given annually to one journalist. She served as a Pulitzer juror for investigative reporting in 2022 and chaired the jury in 2023.

Prior to joining NPR in January 2019, Thompson spent 22 years at The Washington Post, where she wrote extensively about law enforcement, political corruption and guns, and was a White House correspondent during Barack Obama’s first term. Her investigative series that traced the guns used to kill more than 500 police officers in the U.S. earned her an Emmy, a National Headliner, an IRE, a White House News Photographers Association and other awards. In 2015, her reporting found that nearly one person a week died in the U.S. after being Tasered by police. The story was part of a yearlong series on police shootings in the U.S. that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.

In 2017, her examination of Howard University Hospital revealed myriad problems with the storied facility, including that it had a higher rate of death lawsuits per bed than the five other D.C. hospitals. Her project published in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine in May 2018 investigated the unsolved serial murders of six Black girls in the nation’s capital nearly 50 years ago; it later won an SPJ DC award for magazine feature writing and an NABJ award for investigative reporting. She has won numerous other national awards, and was named NABJ’s Educator of the Year in 2017 for her teaching and mentoring at George Washington University. She was part of the Washington Post team that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2002 for coverage of Sept. 11.

Thompson is the past president of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a 6,000-member organization whose mission is to improve the quality of investigative journalism. In 2018, she became the first Black elected president in its 43-year history and served for three terms before being elected board chairman in 2021. She also teaches investigative reporting as an associate professor at GWU, where she founded a student NABJ chapter in 2014, and is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.

Chad Day

Chad Day is chief elections analyst at The Associated Press. Day is a member of AP’s Decision Desk and writes about politics and elections. Previously, he was a national political reporter for The Wall Street Journal in Washington and an investigative reporter at the Associated Press. He was part of a team at the Journal awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting for a series of stories exposing federal conflicts of interest.

He is an adjunct lecturer at Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies where he teaches data journalism for master’s students. He is a former investigative reporter for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri at Columbia.

Stephen Neukam

Neukam, a graduate of the Merrill College master’s of journalism program, covers the U.S. Senate for Axios.

DJNF Data Interns

Below is a rough summary of the interns’ background and data skills

Ethan James Hylton studies at Goldsmiths, University of London and will intern with the IndyStar newsroom. Summary of their data skills: I’ve used Echarts, chart.js, and Flourish in my data journalism work. I used Echarts and chart.js to create an interactive refugee information dashboard. Using these tools I was able to integrate various customization options like tooltips and zoom features. This made it easier for users to explore the data at different granularities, enhancing the storytelling aspect by allowing them to engage directly with the data. I used Flourish to create animated visualizations to illustrate the growing trend of journalist being killed globally in specific countries for the past 20 years. Flourish’s variety of templates and customization options helped me transform raw data into visually appealing and engaging stories, with interactive elements like scroll-triggered animations that captured the audience’s attention and guided them through the data.

Apurva Mahajan studies at University of Maryland and will intern with the The Detroit News newsroom. Summary of their data skills: Python - Since March, I’ve been developing a news application that displays every sponsored congressional trip taken since 2012. I used Python’s Flask web framework for the backend, and HTML, CSS and some Javascript for the frontend.

In the spring, I coded a Python web scraper that gets University of Maryland Police Alerts and sends a message in Slack to alert reporters. Though this did not result in a public-facing story, I used this scraper to create an internal newsroom-wide tool. I also can do basic data analysis in Python.

R - I am comfortable scraping, cleaning and analyzing data in R. At the moment, I primarily fact-check and edit other reporters’ code, analysis and graphics, so I use R to run through someone’s Excel or Python analysis and ensure I reach the same answer with a different process.

HTML, CSS, JavaScript - I’m proficient in HTML and CSS and have used them for front-end design on multiple websites/apps and to customize tooltips and designs in third-party tools such as Flourish, Datawrapper and even Mailchimp. I am a beginner in JavaScript, but have used it to make news applications more interactive through features like fuzzy search/string matching. I’ve also used Javascript libraries such as Leaflet, Datatables and Chart.js for locator maps, tables and data visualizations in my news apps. I’m currently learning D3.js.

Excel, Google Sheets - I use these tools to perform quick data analysis, and they help me add another level of reporting to otherwise quick-turn and straightforward stories by supplementing them with data to contextualize local news with nationwide trends.

Flourish and Datawrapper - I used Flourish and Datawrapper to create graphics and supplement my reporting for daily stories at the Frederick News-Post that originally did not require me to do data analysis. For The Diamondback, I created graphics and maps for our election coverage and coded to create custom GeoJSONs to display mixed electoral seat allocation for a hexmap of U.S. election results.

ArcGIS, QGIS - Though I have yet to apply my GIS skills for a story, I’m a GIS minor and have taken remote sensing coursework. I can comfortably analyze spatial data and satellite data using ArcGIS and QGIS.

Adobe Illustrator - I have experience in creating static graphics in Adobe Illustrator and ai2html. This tool allows me to create custom graphics and execute designs that I could not otherwise with Flourish and Datawrapper’s capacities.

Sophia Nabours studies at University of Arkansas and will intern with the The Marshall Project newsroom. Summary of their data skills: I’m currently learning R and Python to better my data analyzation and cleaning skills. I have taken data sets to aid in my writing for stories about AI Child Sexual Abuse Material Law in Arkansas, Sexual Violence on College Campuses, Suicide Statistics in College Students, and, more recently, I have evaluated my University police Clery Report in 2024 and created a data visualization using Tableau and Adobe.

Emma Morgan Ferschweiler studies at The College of New Jersey and will intern with the NJ Advance Media newsroom. Summary of their data skills: I frequently use Microsoft Excel to compile, organize, and analyze data. This tool helps me better understand datasets and apply them to the larger story.

I use SQL and Python for every step of a data-heavy project, including scraping, compiling, cleaning, analyzing, and visualization. These tools aid with datasets that are too big or complex for Excel. It has helped me uncover truth in datasets and make information more easily readable for audiences.

Patrick McCaslin studies at University of Miami and will intern with the Baltimore Banner newsroom. Summary of their data skills: I’ve used R for datavis (charts and maps), Python to convert pdfs, Flourish to create interactive maps, Excel to manipulate CSV files, and Adobe Illustrator for class to create maps and various basic charts.

Lauren Lifke studies at University of New Mexico and will intern with the Maryland Matters newsroom. Summary of their data skills: Tableau – I created interactive maps of crimes that were reported at UNM. Readers can hover a mouse over color-coded spots where crimes were recorded to read more about where, when and what happened.

Google Sheets/Excel – I sorted crime data into refined umbrella categories. I used that data to create the Tableau maps.

I used Google Sheets to sort out survey responses about which issues our readers care about the most. Respondents were given three questions about which issues they cared about the most, second-most, and third-most. I used Sheets to create a ranked-choice system that evaluated which issues readers care about overall, and I sorted that data by race, gender and other categories.

Datawrapper – I created tables that listed election issues that readers care about. I also used Datawrapper to create bar graphs depicting crime data at UNM over time.

R – I use this software to determine whether there are correlations between two or more data elements for my statistics classes. I create visualizations that depict the relationship between data, and I use the visualizations to interpret the significance of the data in simpler terms.

JMP Statistical Software – I use this software for the same purposes as R, but I create more simple and easy-to-interpret charts and graphs using this software.

Declan Bradley studies at Reed College and will intern with the Howard Center, Univ of Maryland newsroom. Summary of their data skills: - R (tidyverse), Python (pandas): data analysis - Adobe Illustrator: visualization and illustration - Scraping, Browser Automation (rvest, Selenium, Playwright): data collection - Undocumented APIs: data collection - Flourish, ggplot2, Datawrapper, Illustrator, D3: data visualization and presentation - CSS, HTML, JS, jQuery, Flask: story production and web design - QGIS, Mapbox, Scrollama: visual storytelling - git, GitHub: source control, collaboration.

Olivia Borgula studies at University of Maryland, College Park and will intern with the Advertising Specialty Institute newsroom. Summary of their data skills: R: I use R to clean large, messy datasets and analyze them for key findings to enhance my storytelling. In the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism, I web scrape train schedules and combine them into one CSV, join data frames for analysis, use the ggplot library to create graphs of my findings and write functions to create data frames of specific chemicals filtered out from a database of toxic substances traveling on trains.

Flourish/Datawrapper: I visualize data with Flourish and Datawrapper and embed them into stories, adding a multimedia element that helps explain complicated information and figures in a way words cannot. I’ve created custom heat maps by uploading GeoJSON files, stacked bar charts, line graphs and more to explain figures and trends to readers.

Python: I used Python to interact with a Census API, retrieving detailed demographic information such as population statistics, income distribution and education levels.

R SQLite: wrote SQL code and harnessed the SQLite library in R to pull data from a SQL database for the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism.

HTML/CSS: used HTML and CSS for front-end design and to create my portfolio website.

Ava (Xiaoman) Hu studies at University of California, Berkeley and will intern with the Houston Landing newsroom. Summary of their data skills: HTML/CSS/JavaScript: Used for coding interactive news packages. Created an online quiz with Visual Studio Code that showed readers which candidate aligned most closely with their views after completing the questions.

DataWrapper / Knight Lab: Produced five campaign finance graphics for local elections, illustrating top donors, in-state versus out-of-state contributions, and support or opposition from local nonprofits.

MyMaps: After a candidate forum, I mapped frequently mentioned district locations along with candidate comments. This map received positive feedback from my editor and was reused for the next forum.

Sasha Marie Allen studies at University of Maryland College Park and will intern with the Connecticut Mirror newsroom. Summary of their data skills: I have used data visualization tools including DataWrapper, Flourish, Tableau and GG-Plot in R-Studio. I have used DataWrapper to create graphs, charts and maps for publication on Capital News Service to display numerous different datasets. This has aided my story, making sure I don’t overwhelm the text with numbers that can be displayed in a visualization. I have made summary tables and created visualizations using GG-Plot in R-Studio, and made visualizations in Flourish and Tableau.

Yasmeen Emilie Saadi studies at University of Missouri-Columbia and will intern with the Investigative Project on Race and Equity newsroom. Summary of their data skills: I have used Datawrapper to visualize how prevalent straw purchasing is when it comes to gun trafficking crimes committed by women. By making a bar graph, the graphic clearly showed the reader that the gun crime committed most frequently by women was straw purchasing, which supplemented the narrative aspects of the story.

I have also used Datawrapper to map addresses in Oklahoma City that were offered less than the FCC’s definition of broadband by internet providers. While this story did not run, the graphic was able to show that dots were clustered in certain parts of the city which correlated with other demographic factors.

Cooper Gunn Gant studies at University of Arkansas and will intern with the Arkansas Democrat Gazette newsroom. Summary of their data skills: Flourish, used for contrasting The Associated Press’ weekly basketball rankings of Arkansas men’s basketball vs end-of-season placement. It brilliantly contrasted high expectations against low performances by the team over several years.

Nathaniel Harrington studies at Syracuse University and will intern with the WHYY newsroom. Summary of their data skills: DataWrapper: helps visualize trends in population change within Syracuse in connection to environmental racism.

Hannah Bensen studies at Stanford University and will intern with the Investigative Reporting Workshop (Washington Post) newsroom. Summary of their data skills: I have extensive experience in R and Excel for data analysis, acquisition, and visualization. I have used SQL for data acquisition and I have used Flourish and DataWrapper for data visualization. I am learning Python analysis and visualization, and I am learning Git for code version control.

Levi (Lifei ) Jiang studies at University of Washington and will intern with the Philadelphia Inquirer newsroom. Summary of their data skills: D3.js, Datawrapper, Flourish, Echarts.js, RAWGraphic, Infogram, Tableau As someone with a background in data, how to uncover invisible patterns and stories from massive amounts of data is my interest and specialty. When I want readers to pay attention to certain patterns or special events in a data set, I will create various data charts to support my interpretation. Or when the dataset is so large that a simple narrative can’t give readers the full picture, I create infographics to make the data more accessible and logical.

TBA TBA TBA

Resources

Campus Map


Data Journalism Text

Data Journalism with R and the Tidyverse


Important Contacts


Rob Wells, 443-591-1189. email:


David Herzog, TBA. email:


Karen Denny, TBA. email:

Residence Halls & Campus

  • Jennifer Bradley Senior Program Manager Office:301-314-0323 Mobile: 301-440-9276 Email:

  • Rakshanda Hedawoo Assistant Program Manager Mobile: 301-440-9277 Email:

  • Queen Anne’s Hall (For mail/key/access-related questions): 301-314-4455 (HILL)

  • Residential Facilities (To report an issue with your room/residence hall) 301-314-9675 (WORK) Campus Information 301-405-1000

Medical/Emergency Contacts

  • Emergency (University of Maryland Police) 301-405-3333
  • Emergency (Prince George’s County Police) 911
  • Non-Emergency (University of Maryland Police) 301-405-3555
  • University Health Center 301-314-8180